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Authors: Louis Begley

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BOOK: Wartime Lies
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Later that afternoon, Bern came to see us. He brought a bouquet of yellow asters for my grandmother. She thanked him and asked if they were to match her new Jewish star. He also brought cigarettes and vodka and said he didn’t know which was for Tania and which was for my grandfather. Everybody laughed at that, and my grandfather told him he was sure the cigarettes had to be for Tania; if Bern had intended to bring Tania liquor he would have brought champagne.

When the bottle was almost empty, and the Kramers had gone to their room, Bern said that he had been asked to become a director at the Jewish community office the Germans were forming and that he would do it. It might be a way to keep his
garçonnière
and help us with all sorts of things like ration cards; he might be able to get Tania a job. It would become dangerous to be unemployed. He did not care what people thought; if he did not do it, the Jewish-question people at the
Kommandantur
would pick some illiterate black-market profiteer instead. The only other solution for him was the forest, but it was hard to make contact with the partisans, and besides, he did not want to leave Tania and the rest of us without any protection.

It was true that, quite apart from what perhaps went on between him and Tania, Bern was now our only friend.
The Catholic surgeon, like my father, had made his way back to T. when the Polish front collapsed in 1939 but had not been evacuated to Russia. He had been polite to Tania each time she went to see him at the hospital, but Tania said she had a feeling her welcome was wearing out. He had told her right away that it was impossible to give her work at the hospital. If my father had only listened to him before the war and we had all converted, the situation might be different. Now it was much too late even for that; he was sorry that we had brought such troubles on ourselves. Of course, we weren’t really responsible; it was the other Jews, who did not know how to lead a Polish national life. Unfortunately, it was too late for that sort of distinction as well. As far as medication for her respected mother was concerned, professional courtesy was his battle cry, Germans or no Germans. She could have anything she wanted. Tania noted, and mentioned it each time she told the story, that the last time she went for grandmother’s prescription he said good-bye without kissing her hand.

Bern told us that he had learned on the telephone from a colleague in Lwów that the
Kommandantur
there had given the Jewish community office orders to move all the Jews into a ghetto, like the ones in Warsaw and Cracow. It was no laughing matter. People would have to live squeezed together like sardines. It would make us think the new lodgings we shared with these very decent Kramers were luxuriously spacious. He hoped it would not come to that in T. We already had the armbands, the yellow star and the curfew. If the Jewish community office
acted responsibly, and our dear café intellectuals for once avoided provoking the Poles, perhaps we could remain as we were. This way of talking was new, and Tania and my grandfather teased Bern about it, saying he was using very modern Polish. We had always referred to Poles who were Catholics simply as Catholics, because after all we too thought we were Poles. But the mention of the curfew made them remember the hour; it was time for Bern to leave. Tania went out with him, saying she would accompany him as far as the corner.

When Tania returned, grandmother said she was glad she was sick and would not live long anyway. She had been one of four sisters; people said they were all good-looking; now only she was left. When she was a young girl, she could have everything she wanted. Then when her father lost his money, my grandfather performed the only good action of his life: he paid his father-in-law’s debts. The two real children she had were dead; Tania had never been her child. Now my grandfather could be proud of how she had turned out. Just like his women. This was enough misfortune in one life, and yet she didn’t mind the hovel we were in, or wearing a star or an armband, or being beaten or shot like those poor Kippers. When she was ten, she had seen a pogrom. Ukrainian peasants pulled beautiful Jewish men by their beards, violated young girls, beat everybody. Thank God, they had not come into their house, but she had seen and heard. She didn’t think Germans could do worse. But never, in all that time, or anytime until now, had she heard anyone talk as shamelessly as Bern. My grandfather remained silent.
Tania looked very tired and very calm. After a while, she turned to my grandmother and said, You don’t know yet what is shameless, you don’t know yet what we will do, just wait, you will see before you die.

A short time later, Bern got a job for Tania in the Wehrmacht supply depot. They needed someone who could speak and write German perfectly and also do some typing, and finally told the Jewish community office to supply such a person. There did not seem to be any qualified Aryans in T. This development made our situation very much better—we had become the dependents of an essential worker—but it left me very much alone. Grandmother was sicker than usual, and grandfather had to take care of her. Because everything was rationed, he spent a good part of the day buying provisions in the regular stores, where one had to wait in lines, and also pursuing his private connections through which he could get good milk and eggs and sometimes calves’ liver. Grandmother had a liver ailment; it was recommended that she eat only lean food, and calves’ liver was both lean and very strengthening.

I began to spend all the time when grandfather and grandmother did not need me with Irena or the older boys in the building. There was no school for Jews anymore. The boys and I played hide-and-seek in the lumberyard at the end of the street. No workmen ever seemed to be there. We built a shack where we could sit when it rained or when we wanted to talk. We talked about women; they explained how one could shove it in between a girl’s legs so she would bleed or into her rear end. In either case, it
had to hurt. Women bled every month anyway. They used paper to stop it, but sometimes they couldn’t. The blood was called
kurwa
. The worst insult was to call somebody
kurwamać
or
kurwysyn
. That was mother or son of that blood. You could shove it into a woman when she was bleeding and women liked it, but it was a very dirty thing to do. The boys wanted to know if I had already shoved it into Irena. One of them had seen her in the latrine. They thought I should try, when she was asleep. All I had to worry about was the blood that her mother would see in the morning. There was a song that could be adapted to the name of each of us and to the name of each girl we knew. They would sing it about Irena and me: Maciek, Maciek, an officer made Irena an offer, I will shove in my two-meter, you will bleed a whole liter. She cries it’s hard, it’s hard, but this just makes him fart. She cries now I bleed, but he pays no heed. We marched up and down an alley in the lumberyard, taking turns being in the lead and being named in the song with a girl whom one of us was thought to like or who was in his family.

The empty lot and the lumberyard were also, after they got out of their school, the territory of many Catholic boys. They played tag ball and practiced throwing stones at trees, just as they had the day grandfather and I had watched them. When they wanted a space we were in, they would yell that all Jews and other garbage must disappear. We began to throw stones at one another. I would use my slingshot once or twice and then run away. The older boys stayed and fought. I was discovering that I liked to hurt others but was afraid of being hurt myself.

One day, the Catholic boys came in much greater numbers and said they would kill us. It would be a permanent Jew curfew. They had big rocks, the size of fists, and sticks with nails in them. From then on, we went to the lumberyard only during their school hours. We would urinate on the piles of stones they used. It served them right to get Jewish piss on their hands.

I was reading the books of Karl May. Bern had brought them to me, saying they were just the thing to fill my time when grandfather was so busy. Old Shatterhand had no fear of Indians; he liked and understood them very well, and yet he killed them pitilessly. Laughing, Bern pointed out to me that Old Shatterhand often killed fifteen redskins in a row, although his Colt 45 only held six bullets. I was not discouraged by Bern’s scoffing. Probably, May did not bother mentioning each time Old Shatterhand reloaded. Irena liked these books too. When we played, she would be the only squaw left alive in a village where I had just exterminated all the braves. She would plead to be spared; she deserved to be punished for the crimes of her tribe, but she was very young and did not want to die. I would tie her up, sometimes to the chair, and sometimes spread-eagle on Tania’s couch. Then we would argue about whether she should be tortured, for instance by having the soles of her feet burned, or whipped with my lasso, or released at once to become my servant. It was lucky that Irena looked like a squaw. She had black hair and black eyes and a broad nose. She wasn’t very big; I was almost as tall as she and I could wrestle her down when we fought.

Irena found a book called
In the Opium Den
that her father kept in the back of his shop. We read it in Tania’s and my room, where nobody could see us. A German living in China uses opium. He smokes it lying on a low couch, dressed only in a silk kimono. The German’s skin has become all yellow from the opium; he is very thin. His Chinese mistress kneels on the floor next to the couch, also dressed only in a kimono, which falls off her shoulders. Her breasts are small but have large nipples. The German holds her breast and pinches her nipple very hard and explains that he no longer wants to do it; he just wants to puff on his pipe and dream about how they have done it in the past. He tells her his dreams. Then, one evening he feels the stirring of a desire. Near the couch on a little table lies a box studded with precious stones. He asks her to open it and take the ivory-handled razor inside it. Then he makes her cut one nipple with the razor. He wants the blood to run first on his chest and then into his mouth. Irena said we should play opium den. She could get her mother’s bathrobe to use as a kimono, and we would pretend about the razor. Her breasts were already round, like two bumps.

My grandmother felt much worse, and then after leeches and cups were applied directly over her liver to relieve the congestion, she improved. Her room no longer had to be darkened. I was allowed to sit with her. She told stories about the country, when I used to visit them in the summer. She wanted to know if I remembered the rabbits and the goose she kept especially for me, and about picking mushrooms. It was all very vivid in her mind, in what
direction we had gone for a drive on a particular afternoon when my father came to see us, in what clothes she had dressed me, and the day I learned to like cold raspberry soup. She told me about my uncle, and how he died. She said my mother had looked just like him; they were both too gentle and too good. She was glad I took after my grandfather. We were living through a time that was not made for good people.

I liked being with her. Irena now had to be at the shop almost all the time; her parents did not want to be separated from her in case there was another roundup. For the same reason, grandfather no longer allowed me to go out to play with the boys. The first
Judenaktion
had just taken place in T. It was done one morning by the SS, with some Polish policemen in civilian clothes and a lot of Jewish militiamen. I was in the lumberyard with the boys when it happened. Some of them ran home when the shouting began, but I and a couple of others were too scared; we hid between a large stack of boards and the fence. We could watch from there. The Germans went into one house after another, yelling in German,
Alle Juden heraus!
All Jews out! It took a long while, and then people began to pour into the street, where the Jewish militiamen lined them up in an orderly way. I saw my grandparents and Pan and Pani Kramer and Irena, all standing together. Then the Polish policemen began to check everybody’s papers and divide people into two groups. They put my grandparents, the Kramers and some other people off to the side and pushed the other group toward trucks that had meanwhile arrived at the end of the street. A woman I did not
know suddenly broke away from a file that was climbing on a truck and rushed to the other end of the street, where some large cement pipes were stacked. She crawled into one of them and would not come out, although the Germans were ordering her to. For a while, everything was still. Then two militiamen came and poked at her with long sticks until she appeared, on hands and knees, at the other end. There, the Germans kicked and beat her and finally got her on the truck, which was already quite full, and drove away. The militiamen and the Polish police remained and told the Jews who were still in the street to clean up.

When I returned, my grandfather said I was right to remain hidden because it all had happened when I wasn’t with them, but the important thing, in fact, was for me not to be alone. This particular roundup was against Jews without working papers or proof that they were dependents of workers. If they had caught me alone, they probably would have taken me too because I had no papers and nobody would have spoken up for me; then grandmother and grandfather would have had to follow, to be with me. I said it made no sense that they had to go with me if it was right for me to hide in the lumberyard instead of running to them, but grandfather explained that they had already lived their lives; they would be quite willing to go if I could stay with Tania. The thing we had to try hard to prevent was for me to be taken alone or to be left alone if they and Tania were taken.

Tania appeared almost immediately after the roundup was over, very frightened. She had heard about it while it
was still going on; the Germans in her office told her to go home right away to make sure we were safe and gave her a document that was an order saying we were not to be disturbed, which she was to leave with us. We would talk later; in the meantime, she had to go back to work. This was typical of Tania now—she was always saying we would talk when she came back from the office. As soon as she had gotten her job, Tania brought home a typewriter and practiced every evening after work. She said if she learned to type quickly and accurately she would become indispensable. She sat at the table in our room copying page after page of a German novel. Then, to practice dictation, she had my grandfather read aloud from the novel fairly fast, and she tried to keep up with him on the typewriter. One day, she said it was enough; she was the best the Germans had. They gave her a special pass, so that she didn’t have to respect the curfew, and often she worked very late. Sometimes, she was on duty all night and only came home in the morning to change her clothes.

BOOK: Wartime Lies
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